The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, tried to ban the programme. He
failed. He then badmouthed it, calling it a “stunt”.

Tony Blair’s Home Secretary was reacting to a programme that
exposed racism within British police forces. Blunkett’s reaction
was part of Blair’s strategy to win the support of a PC Rob Pulling
type voter: “the angry young white man”. Blunkett plays
a key role in Blair’s strategy. He is Blair’s PC 2322 Rob
Pulling.

PC 2322 Rob Pulling was one of the police cadets whose racism the Secret
Policeman exposed. PC Pulling believes Hitler had the “right idea”.
Had he been successful, his plan to rid Germany of Jews could have been
the “blue print” for Britain gassing of “Pakis”.

None the less PC Pulling is convinced that if Britain is to solve its
ethnic minority problem, a final solution can only be found by adopting
special measures. He said: “[Whites] need to do some dirty work.
Without some dirty work, it’s not going to happen. We also need
to do it legitimately.”

He is willing to put into practice what he believes. But he accepts
there are limits to what he can do “legitimately”. “I’ll
go as far as I could get away with it; if I could get away with killing
a Paki and burying him under a track, I would”, he said.

PC Pulling accepts he is a racist. He claims he is not alone in holding
such beliefs. He said, “I am not out of place. I am not one in
a million. I am the majority.”

David Blunkett believes he speaks for “the majority”. According
to him, his is the voice of the voiceless white working class frustrated
by crime and illegal economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers
(1). A Guardian editorial describes him as being “proud of his
working-class roots and more than ready to represent poor, marginalized
white people” (2).

He does not allow political correctness to frustrate Blair’s
strategy; “…his choice of populist language is absolutely
deliberate and for a purpose” (4). That purpose is to win the
angry young white man away from the appeal of the far-Right. This Blunkett
argues he can only do so by addressing the same issues as BNP does:
white people’s hatred of Asian, Blacks and asylum seekers. In
other word, he plays the race card in order to out race the racist BNP.

Hugo Young argues that to play the race card means to express anti-black
and/or anti-Asian sentiments in “sneaky ways to legitimise such
sentiments among white voters” (5).

Nick Cohen, another columnists, criticises Blunkett for using fear
of the far-Right as a pretext for demonising ethnic minorities. Cohen
rightly suspects Blunkett “has been raising the phantom menace
of the far-Right … as political cover for policies he would push
for if the BNP didn’t exist” (6). Such policies are especially
populist when they centre on Asians culture and religion.

Blunkett believes Asian culture conflicts with British culture: a clash
of civilisation. In 2001, he warned, “[Asians] who have come in
to our home – for that is what it is- should accept [our] norms
just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere” (7). The implication
is British-born Asians are not British if they retain their culture.
This chimes well with PC Pulling’s racist sketch of British-born
Pakistanis: “A dog born in a barn is still a dog; a Paki born
in Britain is a f***ing Paki. ”

Blunkett distinguishes himself from PC Pulling by insisting Asians
adopt British “norms of acceptability”. They should speak
English at home rather their mother tongue. Muslim teachers should conduct
their services in English (8).

He is not afraid to subject Muslims to the “unthinkable”:
in July 2002, he ordered riot police, accompanied by the media, to raid
a mosque and seize a couple seeking refuge from deportation.

Asians should marry British-born spouses rather than partners from
the Indian subcontinent, Blunkett insists (9). He conflates the involuntary
practice of “forced marriage” with voluntary “arranged
marriage”, which he calls a “medieval” practice (10).

No one hears Blunkett insists British-born whites marry spouses solely
from these shores. He makes no prescriptions for German parents, living
in Britain, that they should speak English with their children at home
so as to avoid a schizophrenic “generational relationship”
(11). The Catholic Church receives no bulls from him on conducting mass
in English rather than Latin.

Historically, synagogues were the last places of worship and refuge
to be raid by police dressed in “military” gear.

Expulsion of naturalised citizens, as practised in pre-war Europe,
is now one of the “unthinkable” things New Labour finds
politically expedient to do in order to appease BNP voters.

Blunkett is not the first Labour Home Secretary to pander to the far-Right
by doing the “unthinkable”. In the 1979, Home Secretary,
Merlyn Rees, forced Hindu fiancées to undergo medical examination
to see if each were a “bona fide virgin”. Male doctors performed
virginity tests on women entering Britain from India to marry Asian
British nationals or residents. If a woman was not “virgo intacto”,
immigration officers assumed she was not a “bona fide” fiancée
(12).

Unlike PC Pulling, Blunkett is a sneaky politician. He does not openly
equate each and every Pakistani with a dog. Non the less, Inayat
Bunglawala, Muslim Council spokesman, equates Blunkett’s comments
on Asians to a form of “Paki-bashing” (13). Such bouts of
“Paki bashing” have become predictable and more gratuitous.

The result of Blunkett’s “Paki-bashing” is devastating
for Pakistanis and other ethnic minorities. According to Scotland Yard,
“racist attacks soar each time a politician makes a speech on
race and immigration” (14). Three random examples reinforce the
point.

On September 15, 2001, Haniddullah Aharwal, a 28-year-old Afghani taxi
driver was kicked, punched and stabbed by three white assailants in
Twickenham, west London. He was left paralysed from the neck down (15).

On August 28, 2002, a 28-year-old Iranian asylum seeker, Tayman Bahmani,
was stabbed to death in Peel Street, Sunderland. He had fled Iran for
fear of his life to Britain two years earlier. Police considered Tayman
murder to be racially motivated. His death came at the end of a sustained
period of verbal attacks on asylum seekers by Blunkett (16).

A similar period of “Paki bashing” by Blunkett culminated
in a Muslim corpse being defiled. On January 17, 2003, 65-year-old Habiba
Mohammed’s body was found, by her family, with rashers of bacon
place on her in a mortuary at the Hillingdon hospital in north west
London (17).

The desecration of the Muslim corpse and the stress caused to her family
were the “norms of acceptability” which Blunkett find politically
advantageous to impose on Asians, Blacks and asylum seekers in order
to win the votes of the PC Pullings.

Blair’s strategy, spearheaded by Blunkett, is to win the votes
of the white working class “ready to embrace the far-Right”.
PC 2322 Rob Pulling is representative of this New Labour constructed
stereotype: the angry young white man, haters of Asians, Blacks and
asylum seekers.

John Denham, the former office minister, believes the hysteria about
asylum seekers has lowered the barrier on expressing racist language
(18). By speaking about Asians and asylum seekers in PC Pulling’s
language and penalising them, Blunkett bridges the ideological ‘gap’
between the far-Right and New Labour. Consequently, he endorses BNP’s
racism. Nick Griffin, BNP leader, agrees: “The asylum-seeker issue
has been great for us. This is legitimates us” (19).

That legitimacy manifests itself increase in racial attacks, use of
blatant racist language, BNP electoral success as well as increased
racist policing.

Blunkett, “the hard man of the Right” (20), in trying to
ban the Secret Policeman was only acting to further Blair’s strategy
of appeasing racists rather than confront them.